Long Islander Oscar
Amoroso ventures to New England each year to catch mammoth-size, 130-pound-reel
class, turbocharged “footballs” (a.k.a. giant bluefin tuna).
He says he’s bagged numerous “giant fish” that have topped
1,000 pounds; these are fish that can make grown men cry for their mommies
after they’ve spent some quality time on the grunt-and-groan end
of the rod. A guy who does this type of fishing with just one mate onboard
a majority of the time, Amoroso could’ve made Hemingway flinch in
a staring contest. And on top that, he’s 73 years old.

Having
heard about this local legend, I wanted to learn more about him, so I
spent a day with Amoroso this past spring aboard his 45-foot Hatteras,
Marlin, which he was readying for the giant-tuna season (July through
October) out of Gloucester and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We stood in the
cockpit of his still-shrinkwrapped boat with a cold rain pouring down.
Amoroso gazed at the falling droplets through the makeshift doorway overlooking
the canal of Yachtsmen’s Cove Marina in Freeport, New York. He held
a burning Marlboro in his tough-looking, weathered left hand, and as the
smoke worked its way out the doorway and down the mist-covered canal,
he took me on an H.G. Wells-like trip through his fishing past.

“I
was fishing fresh water on Long Island before I was a teenager. I’d
bend a needle and use oatmeal and dough for bait,” he told me, as
he illustrated baiting the needle with his hands. But catching carp and
sunnies wouldn’t hold this angler’s interest for too long. Amoroso
eventually discovered the fun of spearfishing under a bridge near his
Atlantic Beach home, his first taste of saltwater fishing. All he needed
was a mask and a snorkel, and he was good to go. But he would soon find
out that there were bigger fish to fry.

It
was around 1948 when Amoroso found his way onto a boat and learned to
fish at the nearby Mudhole, a well-known giant-fish area, several miles
off the New Jersey coast and easily accessed by both New York and New
Jersey anglers. “We used to fish [giant tuna] here,” Amoroso
said, adding, “We’d let them go.” My ears perked up like
a dog recognizing its name. “Let them go?” Then again, these
were the golden days of giant fishing, before bluefin flesh commanded
a high price at the market. But just as Amoroso’s appetite for big-game
fishing had been whetted, he joined the Navy and was assigned to Submarine
Attack Squadron 24 based out of Norfolk, Virginia. During his Navy tenure,
Amoroso said he didn’t really fish.(I guess it was a little tough
to troll off the back of an aircraft carrier.) But he did have a boat
and trolled—sort of.